By David Crystal

New from Cambridge University Press!

By Peter Mark Roget

This book "supplies a vocabulary of English words and idiomatic phrases 'arranged … according to the ideas which they express'. The thesaurus, continually expanded and updated, has always remained in print, but this reissued first edition shows the impressive breadth of Roget's own knowledge and interests."

Book Information

This volume propagates chunking as a means of developing lexico-grammaticalcompetence. It reviews in the first part the theoretical foundations(Chunks, Input Processing, Processing Instruction, Construction Grammar)and empirical results which influenced the compilation of the learningenvironment on the DVD which accompanies the book. The second partintroduces the contents and structure of the learning environment anddiscusses its use as a learning tool on the one and as a research tool(through its e-learning-protocol features) on the other hand (including afirst tentative survey of tests already made). Subject matter of thelearning environment are German constructions with the auxiliary sein and a(past or present) participle on the level of constructions, psych effectverbs ("frighten verbs") serve as verbal fillers (a choice which allows toemphasise the interaction between lexical meaning and morphosyntacticstructure). The DVD contains videos, photo sequences and animations with amassive dose of possible chunks, and it guides the student to furtheranalysis by providing explicit knowledge bases in the form of lexicalentries, construction patterns, grammatical explanations, and backgroundtexts.

Explanatory texts on the DVD are available in both German and English.